Introduction
To see a face is already to hear: “Thou shalt not kill.”
--- Emmanuel Levinas
The present reality is a reality of untranslatable otherness.
--- D. H. Lawrence
How can there be the play of the same if alterity itself was not already in the same? --- Jacque Derrida
I. The Ethical Turn of Deconstruction
At the end of the nineteen century, Nietzsche made his famous
pronouncement—“God is dead”—a disturbing force in European culture. And in the middle of the twentieth century, news of another death—“the death of
Man”—was pronounced by Michel Foucault. By their critique of the foundational subject and rejection of any absolute value, both thinkers posed the “question”of ethics. Along these lines, during the last few decades in Anglo-American literary studies, an untheoretical and impressionist mode called “criticism”has been challenged by a more rigorous theoretical and self-reflexive mode called
“theory”—a shift from the idea of the individual as a locus of interiority and creativity to the conviction that subjects are constituted by systems and discursive constraints. It is thus assumed that texts have a multiplicity of meanings that defy or defeat the author’s intention and exceed or elude both the author’s and the reader’s grasp. The shift from human autonomy to literary autonomy derives its strength from the emerging importance of language as the interpretive category of
modern thought. The predicament of contemporary morality is that, following Nietzsche, there is only incommensurability and undecidability among a plurality of interpretations that are contestable.
In reaction to the virtual suppression of ethical and evaluative discourse, many critics argue for a return to ethics. And the 1990s have seen a significant turn to ethics in contemporary literary studies. Though acknowledging the force of theory, many critics (e.g. Wayne Booth, David Parker, Siebers, and Freadman), noting the marked decline of confidence and fervor in ethical mode of reading fiction in recent decades, argue that the advent of theory and “neo-Nietzschean”challenge has made reading narrative merely a straying in moral wilderness. They claim that literary theory is relativistic and unable to promote stable values and standards. A
revitalization of the field of ethics and literature has thus recently gained the attention of scholars in philosophy and literary studies. What is more, the recent turn toward the ethical within literary studies is closely connected to a turn to the literary within ethics. In other words, unlike previous resurgence of ethical criticism associated with literary figures such as Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, this movement is mainly stoked by things going on within philosophy. Many philosophers have sought to re-enfranchise literature by arguing for its special value as a mode of moral inquiry. Moral Philosophers like MacIntyre, Rorty, and Nussbaum have been increasingly concerned with the ethical power of fiction; they have allotted major ethical significance to narrative because they all regard literature (and especially the novel) as the primary vehicle for ethics.1
Yet, for some critics (e.g., Geoffrey Harpham, Andrew Gibson, and Robert Eaglestone), the Aristoteleanism inherent in these philosophers’insistence reveals their philosophical indifference to structuralist and post-structuralist theory of the novel.2 They argue that the recent upsurge of interest in ethical question is to be
welcomed only if it is not a naïve retreat to a critical environment undisturbed by post-structuralism. What they propose is that ethical questions resist settlement and that the novel does not offer a resolution to the “crisis of rationality”but produces such a crisis itself—i.e., the novel should be read creatively as a way of keeping conceptual schemes loose, porous, and responsive to singularity. On that account, deconstruction and its attempt to undermine the certainties of Western metaphysics are defended as an ethical and political practice, one which may question the validity of man and humanism. As such, the recent turn to ethics in the 1990s has been getting aired not only by humanists and moral philosophers but also by postmodern theorists and deconstructionists.3 Very recently deconstruction has also begun to present its way of reading texts—i.e., “rigorous resistance to closure”— as an ethical imperative. Hence the deconstruction of humanist Ethics has now been regarded as the Ethics of Deconstruction.4 The crossing of the projects of ethics and
deconstruction follows the premise that the deconstruction of the self by the other has an ethical significance—the decentering of the subject has brought about a
displacement and a recentering of the ethical. Ethics in this sense does not provide a path to knowledge of right and wrong, good or evil; it is a process of formulation and self-questioning that continually rearticulates boundaries, norms, selves and others.
One of the primary ethical currents within the deconstructive movement was the dialogue between Derrida and Levinas that ended in Derrida’s affirmation that
“the thought of Emmanuel Levinas has awakened us to a conception of an unlimited responsibility that exceeds and precedes my freedom”(Derrida 1999: 3). Simon Critchley asserts that their dialogue has brought forth an ethics of deconstruction, which is not a moment of carnival or liberation, but a moment of the deepest concern with limits, with possibility and impossibility:
For both Levinasian ethics and Derridian deconstruction, this
‘infrastructural’matrix ofalterity would try to show theconditionsunder which something like logocentrism or ontology is possible, whilst at the same time showing how the philosophical pretension or ontological
totality is continually rendered impossible by an alterity that can neither be reduced nor excluded. Derrida and Levinas seek the conditions for the possibility and impossibility of philosophical conceptuality. (1989:
103-4)
Deconstruction conceived as such opens an ethical space of alterity and the deconstructive task accordingly has been regarded as an attempt to find ways of describing a non-normative or non-prescriptive ethics, an ethics that maintains an openness to the other as truly other, not merely an otherwho isthe“same,”following the analogy of universal humanism.
This formulation of the other as “truly other”is the deepest concern of Levinas, who has opened in the past few decades a notable way for an ethical reading of deconstruction. His account of alterity has become an almost mandatory point of reference in recent work confronting ethical issues, with ethics understood as the questioning of the self as it encounters the irreducible Other.5 In his reading of the history of Western thought, the Other has generally been regarded as something provisionally separate from the Same (or the self), but ultimately reconcilable with it;
otherness appears as a temporary interruption to be eliminated as it is incorporated into or reduced to sameness. For Levinas, on the contrary, the Other lies absolutely beyond my comprehension and should be preserved in all its irreducible strangeness.
In order to protect the Other from the aggressions of the Same, Levinas thinks of difference not in the mode of formal logic, but as asymmetry and excess. He introduces his notion of the asymmetry of human relationships in terms of the
face-to-face relation. Levinas definesthefaceasasurplus,oras“theway in which
the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of theotherin me”(TI50). The face is a signification without context, and thus it merely “expresses itself”(TI 51). As an irreducible other, the face is a trace of alterity left in the phenomenal face:
The face, it is inviolable; these eyes absolutely without protection, the most naked part of the human body, offer, nevertheless, an absolute resistance to possession, an absolute resistance in which the temptation of murder is inscribed: the temptation of an absolute negation. The Other is the sole being that one can be tempted to kill. This temptation of murder and this impossibility of murder constitute the very vision of the face. To seeafaceisalready to hear:“Thou shalt not kill.” (Levinas1990: 8) In Levinas’sdescriptions,the face wears a double aspect—it is at once absolutely defenseless and also that which opposes my power over it. As an other, it is
described as the destitute one and also as overlord. On the one hand, its nakedness, its wretchedness, indeed, its strangeness are a mark of its absence and exile from the world. But on the other hand, the infinite alterity of the speaking face is
incommensurate with a power exercised. It is in this sense that while murder is a realpossibility,itiswhatLevinascallsan “ethicalimpossibility.” The interruptive force of the face enables the encounter with the other to call into question and transform theself’shabitualeconomy. The face-to-face encounter has nothing symmetrical about it.6
What Levinas calls the face, alterity, or exteriority, which cannot be reduced to the Same, plays an important role in Derrida’sunderstanding oftheethical. This Levinasian influence accounts for Derrida’scharacterization ofdeconstruction in ethical terms. Yet in his essay “Violenceand Metaphysics,”Derrida not only reveals this influence, but provides a critical reading of Levinas’sconception ofethics. Like Levinas, Derrida rejects the Husserlian interpretation of the Other as an alter ego, but
contrary to Levinas, he insists that the Other cannot be wholly other and must be thought of as “another I”(with more emphasis on “another”) and respected on that basis. AttheheartofDerrida’sessay isthequestion ofhow the rupture of a totality or a system of thought, based on the transcendence of the face beyond language, can possibly be represented, or have any meaning, in language? As Derrida sees it, the thoughtofLevinas“can makeustremble”(VM,82)asittriesto liberateitselffrom Greek philosophy and attempts to re-establish ethics and metaphysics in the
transcendenceof“a non-violentrelationship to theinfiniteasinfinitely other”(VM 83). Derrida argues that it is impossible to found an ethics upon the notion of a purely non-violent opening of the ego to the other: “How can we think of the other, if the other can be spoken only as exteriority and through exteriority”(VM 116)? Any inquiry, even the most patient and attentive deconstructive reading, which aims at a self-articulating resistance to intersubjective violence, is inevitably violent. The denial of all violence would be the denial of all relationship, which is itself violent.
Derrida’s approach to the ethical dimension of deconstruction can be found in the concept of the closure of metaphysics which he definesas“the problem of relation between belonging and the breakthrough”(VM 110).7 In other words, pure self-identity and pure difference can never be thought separately and in strict opposition—they are always already embedded in the alteration between purity and contamination, unity and multiplicity, war and peace. Hence Derrida raises the question: “How can there be the play of the same if alterity itself was not already in the same”(VM 126-7)?
Derrida’s essay deconstructs Levinas’s trust in the unmediated relation of the face-to-face encounter. And as a result of a complex engagement with Derrida, Levinas reworked his understanding of the fundamental moment of ethical
responsibility. The difficulty language has in speaking of the excess derived from
face-to-face relation is the central problem in Levinas’s second major work,
Otherwise than Being , wherein Levinas elaborates a new terminology for expressing
the priority of ethics over ontology. Words such as “the Same,”“metaphysics,”
“transcendence,”“exteriority,”“totality”and “separation”have either disappeared or occur relatively rarely. This later text bristles with terms like “proximity,”
“approach,”“obsession,”“hostage,”“persecution”and “substitution.”8 Even l’Autre and l’Autrui play a less important role, being largely replaced by le prochain
(the neighbor).9 Here Levinas proposes that language is amphibology because it is made up of the transcendent saying and the immanent said. It is the interweaving of the two which allows the ethical to signify within ontological language. The saying is the impossibility of denying the other; the site of our responsibility for the other.
Itisan “exposedness to theotherwhereno slipping away ispossible”(OB 50). The said is the logos, the horizon of meaning because it creates the identity of an entity by
“thematizing”it. The saying and the said exist in continual tension. The saying is unsayable because at the moment of saying it becomes the said. In other words, any manifestation of the sayingdemands“asubordination ofthesaying to thesaid,to the linguisticsystem and to ontology”(OB 6). While incarnated in language at a cost, the saying nonetheless must
enter into a proposition and a book . . . . It must spread out and assemble itself into essence, posit itself, be hypostatized, become an eon in
consciousness and knowledge, let itself be seen, undergo the ascendancy of being. Ethics itself, in its saying which is a responsibility, requires this hold. (OB 43-4)
The saying, which is unthematizable, impossible to delimit, becomes limited,
thematised, said. Yet, conversely, the saying can never be totally engulfed in the said.
Through its manifestation the saying appears as a disruption of the said.10 That is,
the saying both stimulatesthesaid and rupturesit:“an affirmation and aretraction of thesaid”(OB 44). Thesignificanceof“thesaying thatisabsorbed in thesaid isnot exhausted ”(OB 47). Rather,it“imprintsitstraceon thethematization itself”(OB 46-7).11 With the distinction between the saying and the said, Levinas emphasizes the excess of meaning that overflows any statement, and the impossibility of ever completely reducing the saying to the said. It is Levinas’sdistinction between the saying and the said that brings his thought closer to Derrida’s. Thesaid isLevinas’s admission that, as Derrida argues, language is always already violent and that this violence is necessary for the beginning of any system.
Levinas’s conception of ethics as an asymmetrical relation between the same and the other opens many possibilities in literary studies. For Maurice Blanchot, the effect of Levinas’s writing was to keep the question of ethics open when for most it has become a closed issue. Blanchot proposes a tacit rewriting of ethics as a poetics of the Outside—when the other speaks to me, my world is not guaranteed, but drains away with my power to grasp it. For Blanchot, the experience of writing and the demand of ethics are inseparable. What we get from literature in relation to ethics is what Blanchot, following Levinas, names the “Saying”—“that ‘inspiring’insomnia when all having been said, ‘Saying’is heard.” On that ground, in The Writing of Disaster, Blanchot describes three different ways of reading:
There is an active, productive way of reading which produces text and reader and thus transports us. There is a passive kind of reading which betrays the text while appearing to submit to it, by giving the illusion that the text exists objectively, fully, sovereignly : as one whole. Finally, there is the reading that is no longer passive, but is passivity’s reading. It is without pleasure, without joy; it escapes both comprehension and desire.
It is like the nocturnal vigil, that ‘inspiring’insomnia when, all having
been said, ‘Saying’is heard, and the testimony of the last witness is pronounced. (101)
The “Saying”in literature is precisely that uncanny moment of saving a text from being lost in the “Said”of a book. These moments are a testimony to the irreducible otherness of the other and to our ethical responsibility in reading a literary text
wherein the excess of meaning makes it a question “to”philosophy, rather than merely a question “of”philosophy, as what the moral philosophers have thought literature to be.
II. Lawrence and the Ethical Criticism
Lawrence has been widely regarded as belonging to Leavis’s tradition. When differentiating the literary practice of Lawrence and Joyce, Daleski identifies these two novelists respectively to the two rival critical schools and approaches today.
According to Daleski, Lawrence’s work, in its insistence on meaning of literature, on its relation and force to life, “links up with a traditional critical stance, one that we may associate with the work of F. R. Leavis”; Joycean practice, on the other hand, in its manifestation in verbal play that destabilizes meaning and detaches the text from the world, is associated with “the work of Derrida and the Deconstructionists”(1989:
92). However, such a common attitude that Lawrence and Joyce represent
antithetical poles of modernism becomes less tenable with an increasing awareness of Lawrence’s conscious problematising of language. Undeniably, the Leavisite vision of Lawrence as an intensely moral novelist was important in shaping the view of Lawrence’s works throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. For many of the critics who had been brought up with Leavis’s brand of critical practice, Lawrence’s novels became important for their statement of moral resistance to the forces of industrial
modernity and capitalism. Leavis conceives of Lawrence’s vision of the world as a stable, normative, and incomparably “diagnostic”guide to the crisis of modern civilization. Lawrence’swork is“an immensebody ofliving creation in which a supreme vital intelligence is the creative spirit—a spirit informed by an almost infalliblesenseforhealth and sanity” (Leavis 1964: 81). It was Leavis’s reading of Lawrence which most significantly shaped him as proto-proponent of “Life”against the mechanization and dehumanization endemic to the technological civilization of modern industrial society.
Nonetheless, the major weakness of Leavis’s account is that it can find no way of dealing with the contradictions in Lawrence’s work other than denying their very existence. Gainsaying Eliot’sclaimsthatLawrence was“sick,”Leavis declares flatly thatthereis“no profound emotional disorder in Lawrence, no obdurate major disharmony; intelligence . . . is not thwarted or disabled by inner contradictions in him, whether we have him asartist,critic,orexpositor”(1964: 29). The influential
account of Lawrence by Leavis has seemed unsatisfactory to some of Lawrence’s later admirers because it seemed to argue the profundity of Lawrence’s vision in an
apparently literalistic and moralistic spirit. Some critics later correct Leavis’s unitary conception of Lawrence’s celebration of positive life-forces by bringing out another, demonic Lawrence, ambiguously fascinated by corruption, disintegration and dissolution. For instance, Clarke insisted that what appear to be differentiated as positive and negative terms in Lawrence are often interchangeable, and that disintegration, dissolution and corruption are welcomed as necessary phases of growth.12 Leavis’s conception of the novel evokes a simple structure based on a pattern of moral antitheses, and yet Lawrence’s novels are too complex to support any single position. On the contrary, Lawrence is able to raise special questions
precisely because he is not afraid to contradict himself.
While in the middle years of last century, Lawrence was praised as a highly moral writer, in the 1970s, mainly due to Kate Millet’s attack, Lawrence has been assumed to be politically incorrect. Feminists see clearly defined patterns of male dominance and female submission in his texts and find these offensive. Lawrence has thus been regarded as a sexist writer. What these feminist critics had in common with earlier critics was that there was still very little attention being paid to the
linguistic complexities of Lawrence’s work. Critics have most often treated his writing as if it were principally a tissue of ideas or of represented experiences, not a linguistic sign. For instance, Kate Millet’s interpretation of Women in Love is crude in simply equating Birkin with Lawrence and in overlooking Ursula’s skeptical resistance to the masculine doctrines asserted by Birkin.13 In his attempt to call for more developed attention to contradiction and excess inherent in Lawrence’s work, Jonathan Dollimore claims that“thereismoreto besaid aboutLawrence; much more than was usually said in the days when he was celebrated as a prophet of straight liberation, and more than is often said when he is castigated from the vantage point of contemporary sexualpolitics”(269). Stereotypes about Lawrence are alive both in academia and in the wider culture—Lawrence as a racist, a fascist, and a sexist.
Indeed, his use of oxymoron and his play with opposites and extremes often (mis)lead the readers who react quickly and antagonistically to one side of the opposition.
Attention to the ideological content alone, whether it is conveyed by characters or by the narrator, will easily gravitate an one-sided (mis)understanding. Accordingly, reading Lawrence’s fiction is challenging, and his verbal idiosyncrasies do demand critical scrutiny.
In fact, Lawrence himself attacksthe“referential”conception oflanguageand of the human subject somewhat ahead of his time. He saysthat“outofapattern of lies art weaves thetruth”(SCAL 8), suggesting that truth isnotout“there”to be
“represented”by art,and thatthewordsconveying truth aretechnically the same wordsforming “apattern oflies”;therefore,themeaning ofwords is far from self-evident and uniform. His famous contention—“Never trust the artist; trust the tale”(SCAL 8) — prefigures the insights and methods of deconstructive criticism.
Lawrence also dissolves the “old stable ego”of character to recognize the impersonal dimension within the personal. Instead of an autonomous ethical entity, the self becomes a dynamic and evolutionary matrix of competing forces. As a novelist, Lawrence is more a man consciously (or unconsciously) problematizing his vision than a man struggling to communicate a single truth through language. Both he and his characters reflect repeatedly on the nature of language and autonomy of the human subject. Some literary critics have begun to focus on the formal complexity of Lawrence’s work by investigating the way he calls into question the “referential”or
“substantial”conception of language and of the human subject.14 On account of this, Doherty argues that Lawrence reveals himself as “an ardent deconstructor of
logocentric models of completion and closure”(477). Working through his novel leaves the reader sometimes with the sense that its “messages”are snares and delusions.
For all that, Lawrence was certainly not a deconstructionist. Quite the opposite, he often clings to the traditional view that one can avoid the snares and deception of metaphor insofar as language is used carefully and properly. Also he would probably haveopposed deMan’scontention thatthereisno “privileged observer”and hence no essence of truth in a world based on the figurative structure (de Man 1971: 10). Yet Lawrence sometimes does reveal in his work the idea central in Nietzschean thought that language is a network of arbitrary signs and conventions that have no inevitable connection with “presence”or “truth.”
Lawrence’s attitude to language has always been double: while using it consummately,
he is at the same time wary of its tendency to substitute words for experience and to ossify our understanding. In other words, while language has the capacity to illuminate the nature of things, to enrich their relation to the world, it also has the capacity to substitute its own forms for things. Moreover, considered as instrument of the ego or ideal self, language is ironically more than often the betrayer of truth and sincerity since all language is metaphorical and thus words do not always mean what they say or say what is meant. Lawrence remains acutely aware of the double nature of language and so language as it is used in his fiction is necessarily distinct from its object, which it reflects only obliquely. In this respect, Lawrence’s insights
anticipate those of deconstruction and so the way to the heart of his imagination is through confrontation with the dense idiom of his verbal art. However that may be, on the other hand, in his novel a utopian site is located. Diane Bonds thus argues that Lawrence oscillates between two antithetical models of language, “differential”
and “symbolic,”which correspond to those of self, “relational”and “organic”( 21).
Accordingly, it is more likely that Lawrence’snovelboth anticipates and is veritably
“other”to the paradigm of deconstructive criticism.
On that ground, those critics with simplistic or rarefied ethical assumptions (either of language or of subjectivity) would have had, in some ways, their empty and futile say in their reading of Lawrence’s fiction. In proposing a rethinking of the relation between ethics and fiction by appealing to Levinasian thought, Andrew Gibson indicates that traditionalethicalcriticism was“reluctantto problematizethe mimeticpremise”(54). The assumption of the mimetic premise is that, in fiction, ethics and representation are inseparable. Such an assumption makes it impossible for a novel to have an ethical dimension outside its mimetic project. While Leavis assumes that a novel’s ethical power is inseparable from a kind of mimetic adequacy, for Levinas, the ethical relation begins precisely as the other in its infinity exceeds
any presentation of it, in the failing or ruin of representation (Gibson 56-7).
Alluding to Levinas’s critique on the mimetic premise, Zygmunt Bauman also
indicates how modern ethics emphasized the similarity between one and an other. In the modern conception, particularity is removed, as we all participate in a
commonality, and it is the responsibility of the other to help the self move toward that similar perfection that is posited in each of us. By contrast, according to Bauman, postmodern ethics emphasized difference, especially through the influence of the
work ofLevinas,who “accordstheOtherthatpriority which wasonceunquestionably assigned to theself”(Bauman 85). In this postmodern conception of the other, in Levinas’sterms,“thereisno fusion:therelation to theotherisenvisaged asalteriy”
(Levians 1999: 103). Such otherness is a kind of irreconcilable difference of singularities.
In certain respect, Lawrence startlingly anticipates such postmodern conception of the other based on Levinas’s ethical philosophy of alterity. As a novelist,
Lawrence’s remarkable ability is to respond both to the otherness of language and to the moment by moment strangeness of other beings and the state of his own existence.
A major problem and theme with which Lawrence is chiefly concerned is to see others not as threats to his individual being, but as independent beings with whom he can be in a satisfying relation. We think of Tom Brangwen’s first sight of the “foreign”
Lydia Lensky in The Rainbow, of the initial encounter between Birkin and Ursula in the “Classroom”chapter in Women in Love, or of the unexpected confrontation with a reptile in Lawrence’s well-known poem “Snake.” His writing is saturated with a profoundly intimate philosophy of the unsubsumable Other. In fact, contemporary critical thinking based on Levinas’s concept of “absolute alterity”can put the reader at ease with Lawrence’s repeated emphasis on “radical untranslatability”—a notion made more popular by poststructuralist theory. In “Democracy,”Lawrence declares:
“The fact that an actual man presents before us is an inscrutable and incarnate Mystery, untranslatable, this is the fact upon which any great scheme of social life mustbebased. Itisthefactofotherness”(RD 78). With a hint of Levinas’s notion of asymmetry, Lawrence insists on the “incomparability”of beings:
When I stand with another man, who is himself, and when I am truly myself, then I am only aware of a Presence, and of the strange reality of Otherness.
There is me, and there is another being. That is the first part of the reality.
There is no comparing or estimating. There is only this strange recognition of present otherness. (RD 80. Emphasis added.)15
Thus one man is neither equal nor unequal to another; he is different and unique.
In fact, much of Lawrence’s work, fiction or non-fiction, is devoted to teaching us to think in terms of difference and otherness. In his study of American literature, Lawrence proposes that the English should not assume they already know what American literature has to offer them; rather, they should read American literature in the defamiliarizing ways:
We have thought and spoken till now in terms of likeness and oneness.
Now we must learn to think in terms of difference and otherness. There is a stranger on the face of the earth, and it is no use our trying any further to gull ourselves that he is one of us, and just as we are. There is an
unthinkable gulf between us and America, and across the space we see, not our own folk signaling to us, but strangers, incomprehensible beings, simulacra perhaps of ourselves, but other, creatures of an other-world . . . . The present reality is a reality of untranslatable otherness . . . . The oneness is historic only. (SM 17)
In Women in Love, Birkin, in an argument with Hermione, explicitly denies the humanist notion of transcendent equality. “One man isn’t any better than another,
not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, so that there is no term of comparison”(WL 104). Not only will Birkin continue to stress the utter difference of each individual, he will also emphasize that otherness can be neither defined nor restricted, but only acknowledged and respected.
It is in this sense that Lawrence’s work exceeds the frame of traditional ethical criticism, for which ethics is only thinkable in terms of certain uniform characteristics or consistent features. The limitation of the older moral criticism is the assumption that ethics is a totality or involves totalities, whether of value or perception. This is an ethics that cannot allow for radical difference, heterogeneity, and the thought of the incommensurable. Critics or writers with the same assumption will return repeatedly to metaphysics and slip into paradoxical positions, where the paradoxes are neither managed, nor worked with. On the contrary, Lawrence’s texts, with all the paradoxical positions as a preoccupation, are saturated with both metaphysics and otherness. However powerful the influence of a particular doctrine or “metaphysics”
in his novels might be, there is in them also a sense of the intrinsic otherness of a reality independent of the author’s intention, the character’s perception, or the narrator’s understanding— a sense that something is included more than, or different from, the way the author’s or the hero’s theory seeks to define it. Through the work of such textual otherness, Lawrence also presents a vision of selfhood in which we encounter with what exceeds human consciousness and eludes the grasp of a knowing subject. Lawrence wants to encourage the kind of “caring”consciousness that will let things shine forth as what they are. In certain way paralleling Levinas’s assertion that the self’s ethical responsibility is manifest as attentive responsiveness to
irreducible otherness of the other, Lawrence believes that new worlds can be created every day, in a quotidian miracle, provided we open ourselves up to the world in an act of attention— “An actofpureattention,ifyou arecapable of it, will bring its own
answer”(SEP 55).
III. Encountering Otherness in Lawrence’sText
As has been indicated above, the ethical turn of deconstruction has posed significant challenges to traditional ethical thinking, suggesting the need for an ethics more sensitive to otherness and difference. In the past few decades, many thinkers have attempted to offer a bridge between literary interpretation and ethical thought by focusing on our relation to an unsubsumable Other. In the light of these thinkers’
theoretical tenets—with more emphasis on Levinas, and also with reference to the work of Derrida, Nietzsche, Blanchot, and some French feminists— I aim to explore three dimensions of such an ethics of alterity as they are elaborated in Lawrence’s fiction: how to describe otherness, how to relate responsibly to an other, and how to compare an idea of otherness to the experience of reading a text.16 And since ethics is not and cannot usually be examined in isolation, I aim to explore it as it is
connected to related issues—language, love and sexual difference. Lawrence’s rejection of reducing the Other to the Same has enormous ramifications for his understanding and treatment of these issues. Both sides of the following polarized approaches concerning the above issues are simultaneously addressed in his fiction:
other as similar or other as different; others for self or self for others; reading for ethics or ethics of reading.
Both Lawrence and Levinas provoke the possibility of thinking radical difference.
They are both concerned with the problem of intersubjective violence and they both insist on an irreducible element in human contact, an element in face-to-face
encounters that cannot simply be sublimated at a higher level. The specificity of the
surplus in the encounter remains crucial to both Lawrence and Levinas because it keeps the otherwise monadic subject open to the outside; such an excess necessitates that the self is never merely an appropriation machine, but always open to the other.
Yet the location of the surplus engendered in the encounter with the Other firstly differentiates their ethics of alterity. For Levinas, this excess (which he calls
“infinity”) is the irreducible specificity of the other that traces and calls for the responsibility of the self. In Lawrence, on the other hand, the production of excess and surplus is attributed mainly to “I”—the self. Put differently, while Lawrence’s conception of untranslatability between subjects glorifies the self for its infinite potentiality, the Levinasian ethics exalts the other to the almighty power.
Beyond that, if the insistence on an encountering with radical otherness is what brings Lawrence and Levinas closest, the aim of such an encountering is where they depart the farthest from each other. While Lawrence is more interested in the responsibility of flourishing the Self through recognition of intrinsic otherness, Levinas is obsessively concerned with how the Self is infinitely “obligated”to respond to the call of the Other. In other words, Lawrence’s primary concern is the problem of how to connect with the other while not sacrificing the self; for Levinas, it’s the problem of how to maintain the alterity of the other without subsuming it in the realm of the Same. Although Lawrence never ceases to pay attention to
otherness throughout his writings, he usually returns to focus on the self and tends to neglect the precise role and state of the Other. For Lawrence, our responsibility is, first and foremost, to ourselves and for ourselves. While proposing to let things shine forth as what they are by not violating their inalienable otherness, this “letting be”risks the danger of ignoring or leaving alone the Other.17 In this sense, Levinas’s ethical philosophy, which is radically centered on the Other, offers the missing
characterization of the role and function of the Other within his writings and provides
a more thorough understanding of the “for-the-other”within the self-Other relation.
On the other hand, Levinas’s excessive mode of insistence that “I”am endlessly obligated to the Other is indeed enough to make anyone tremble. While Lawrence is as critical of the possessive mode of being, unlike Levinas, who seems to be guilty of enjoyment in the self, Lawrence is not against enjoyment and even sees it as a life responsibility.18 In this sense, Lawrence’s appreciation of joyfulness and
gratification of the self offers us moments of release from Levina’s serious solemnities which have indeed burdened us too much with unlimited obligation toward the Other.
Strikingly different though they are, they both endeavour to seek a satisfying relation with the absolute Other. Yet how can one be in a relation to the other, withoutnegating theother’salterity,withoutreducing itto oneself, without the use of some mediating category, based on mutuality, or commonality, or some supposed standard of truth? When the idea of difference is radicalized to the point of radical untranslatability, it threatens to turn into a form of relativism that may in fact hide a more fundamental indifference or even an altered form of fascism.19 With this concern in mind, I aim to examine in this study, through a reading of Lawrence’s fiction and an engagement with some of the thinkers of ethical alterity, the latent dangers as well as the ethical force in treating the other as absolutely different, unknowable, and beyond any kind of common understanding or experience. This involves the dilemma of whether it is best to emphasize radical difference or to seek some sort of equivalence or commensurability between moral agents. Derrida is here put forward as the one who insightfully raises the question and also seeks to think beyond absolute alterity to a sort of other as a version of the self, an alter-ego (though with more emphasis on “alter”). This means acknowledging that when we affirm our differences, we need to preserve a necessary sense of what we have in
common. In other words, we have to take care to see that our respect for otherness and heterogeneity is not bought at the price of a denigration of sameness and
homogeneity. In fact, by refusing to acknowledge the indispensability of recognition, any celebration of difference deprives itself of a nuanced appreciation of the other’s difference from me. As Bakhtin argues in hislaterwork,“Both relativism and dogmatism equally exclude all argumentation, all authentic dialogue, by making it eitherunnecessary orimpossible”(1984: 69). Genuine encounter and dialogue entail that something, but not everything, can be known and understood between intrinsically different beings.
In Part One, my attempt is to investigate the vital contribution Lawrence can make to our rethinking of ethical questions in terms of language. It is frequently argued that Modernism and Postmodernism display their anti-ethical and therefore anti-humanistic prejudices most precisely in their substitution of the category of language for the category of man. But this charge does not survive a review of the dominant thinkers of the last century—e.g. Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, and Blanchot—for whom, language is not just an autonomous formal system but rather a medium saturated with otherness, and thus with ethics. As Harpham indicates, in view of Nietzschean argument, “theModernistemphasison language,often discussed as an avoidance of the question of ethics, might be seen instead as one particular
approach to ethics”(1992: 64). Put another way, the real ethical function of language is confirmed rather than dissimulated by the undecidability of reference.
Most recent literary theory can actually be read as an ethically-motivated attack on reference. The law of language is that things must be given their proper names—and yet that no name is truly proper. In other words, although language ought to refer, it does not always do so. As a matter of fact, language intervenes on the world, acting on and altering what it represents, most significantly through its nonreferentiality,
